Make your money work for you!

How many P2P portals to include in your portfolio?

Since there is a significant amount of P2P portals now available compared to a few years ago, the question quickly arises – how many portals should you include in your portfolio? Is it better to focus on just a few portals, or should you attempt to diversify and reduce risk by including a large amount of portals? How does this change when the total sum of your investments gets bigger? Are there downsides to diversifying?

My current P2P portfolio

As time has moved, my P2P portfolio has changed a lot. I started, like many others with 100% Bondora, but have now completely exited it. I also tried Moneyzen, Viventor and Estateguru, which I’ve also not kept in my portfolio. It definitely took me a while to figure out a selection I like, and it’s constantly changing in time. Currently the balance is as follows:

P2P investments currently make up 47% of my whole investment portfolio. This means, that from my total portfolio the rates are: OR 24%; CE 13%; Twino and Mintos ~5% each. As you can see the exposure to Omaraha is rather big, the exposure to other portals is significantly less.

Liquidity

As with all investments, something to consider is liquidity. With P2P investments liquidity mostly comes from two aspects – firstly the length of the projects/loans (for example Twino’s 1-3 month loans vs Omaraha’s 5 year loans) and secondly the availability of a secondary market (and the speed of trading there).

For me, I’ve decided that for now, liquidity is not a huge priority for me, which means that I’ve allowed my portfolio to move towards longer term locked-in projects. Omaraha does not have a secondary market, and while defaulted loans have a sell-back function, it’s still a rather long term investment. CrowdEstate is also a long-term prospect, since while the projects are generally 1-2 years in length, the portal has a right to extend the projects and there is no secondary market to allow for an exit.

However, a part of my portfolio I’ve still kept rather liquid and this part is carried by Mintos and Twino. With both of these portals, I can easily pull out money from in a matter of days, so if for some reason I need to move money to another investment, or have need for cash, then this portion of my portfolio allows me to do this.

Risk

Now, assessing risk is a tricky thing in the P2P business. While you can look at overall history of the portals, a lot of them are new enough to not have much of a track record. Both Twino and Mintos in theory should be relatively low risk, however since Mintos has at least one loan originator that’s in trouble (and might go bankrupt), it’s clear that things can still go wrong.

The most ‘stable’ part of my P2P portfolio is probably Omaraha, due to the length of experience they have, and the overall stability of the market. However, Omaraha is also prone to all kinds of radical changes (such as the interest cap instated last week), which means that the portal risk itself might influence your long term strategy.

Crowdestate is clearly the most risky part of my P2P portfolio at this point, due to both the type of investments (mostly real estate development projects) and the risk of the real estate market overheating. This means that I will not really allow the volume of investments to increase too much there, I’ve mostly hit the point where I reinvest returned money, and add in less than I used to.

Time expense

With every new P2P portal that you add, there is both an investment of time and money. You need to invest time to figure out how this particular portal works, and how to achieve the best results. Depending on the portal this might require quite a bit of tinkering. For example, Omaraha has been offering great returns, but the time investment in managing interest rates there was also quite a bit of work. In comparison to Mintos or Twino, where you could pretty much just cruise by, using the autobidder function.

Since I invest though my company account, then any new portal also means more bookkeeping, and additional tracking. This means that there isn’t really much point in adding in a portal just to put a couple of hundred of euros into it, it becomes reasonable to add in another portal once the investment is in the thousands already. This means that while I’m currently at 4 portals, it’s not unreasonable to add in a fifth, there just has to be a reason for it – either it offers some different level of liquidity; there is a significantly different risk profile (different sector, country etc.), or an attractive risk-reward ratio.

Post navigation

27 thoughts on “How many P2P portals to include in your portfolio?”

Hi Kirsti, where did you get this info from: Mintos has at least one loan originator that’s in trouble (and might go bankrupt)? Can you point to more details so we can exclude that originator from Auto-invest?

I asked for an official communication in the English forum about the lowered interest rates, and there it is : https://omaraha.ee/en/forum/topic/811/ (it’s annoying that Omaraha doesn’t communicate clearly about these changes ).

Note that it only applies to Estonian loans, not to the ones in Slovakia or Finland

One of the reasons several investors have been withdrawing from Twino is the recent news that a huge part of their employees were fired in Georgia and a lot of activities there cut down (think regulations or such caused issues), which has hit loan volumes quite hard. Also, the PG loans are not attractive to many investors.

I don’t do P2P but that Crowdestate seems actually intersting. There are risks in real estate but there are risks everywhere. I got to look more at this but must admit I will probably not do anything now. Then for me as a foreigner there is a small but extra hurdle to overcome. I guess the investing is simple but there will be tax issues further down the road.

How am I investing when I don’t do P2P? I am almost fully invested in the Nordic and North American stock markets. So far returns have been decent but not amazing.

I believe in diversification, over the years the portfolio has grown to almost 100 different stocks. The theory is that diversification makes resilient although in recessions most of the stocks tend to suffer. Actually 100 is probably overdoing it but I’m a stock junkie so I can indulge in such an overly diversified portfolio.

Wow, that Bondora loss is very big! I’d assume there is hope for some recovery? My Bondora private portfolio is now 5 years old, and I’m seeing steady recovery happening (there is little of it, but I’ll end up in the green at least).

I have been performing slow exit from Bondora about 7 months already and recently withdraw almost all the money from Twino. My strategy is to concentrate mostly on Estateguru and Mintos for the same reasons you wrote in the blog about your own decisions – I like risk/reward tradeoff those portals offer and I can manage bookkeeping myself.

Like you, from my whole portfolio P2P is about 50% at the moment. I’d like it to be about 25% and my medium to long term aim is to gradually increase my stock portfolio.

I only pick manually. I invest usually 200 eur into one project and I try to invest into projects that pay monthly interest. Also I try to google persons behind the company that is getting the money and if I find something that I don’t like then I’ll just wait for another project.

I guess my main mistake with is I started their new portfolio when they first started 3 years ago and they give me so many Finland and Spain loans, so many of them went delinquent and now, recover 3€ a month and I have very little hope for my 4000€will end up in red for sure. I had too much confidence in them at the start.

Also, my recent experience with Viainvest of not being able to connect to the website for like a week showed how easy a problem can happen.

My “Bad Loans” are 6,7% and around 13% for Yellow loans. For a total of around 20% of delinquency. These are not low numbers if the recoveries from sold loans is only around 70%.
Furthermore I have a very conservative approach so I consider as red all my yellow loans.
If you have a specific approach or strategy for Omaraha I may try something different.

At the moment, am actively investing into Twino and have been thinking about adding another Latvian to my portfolio, probably Mintos. Crowd is my middle/long-term investment but right now am trying to focus more on short-term investing. All in all, P2P portals make up about 25% of my whole portfolio.

There is just no volume there (they give out about 60K of loans per month). Also, their initial sales pitch was that they will have very low default rates (which would justify the low interest rates), but this has proven to be false.

Thanks for the answer!
But how do you feel about the current situation in Omaraha. I choose my loans manually and it seems there’s very few of them lately (I prefer loans with score at least 900 and only Estonian).

I think manually selecting loans is pretty impossible with Omaraha. While the loan volumes have dropped, a significant majority of the loans are filled by the autobidders, never making it to the public list at all.